A complete reliability program improves the plant’s bottom line

The LyondellBasell Channelview, Texas, plant’s reliability program has had a direct and sustained impact on equipment availability and overall plant performance. In fact, the plant’s reliability program has not only had a significant impact on the plant’s bottom line with respect to cost improvements but also created performance improvements in all areas, including risk mitigation and asset reliability.

“This reliability program helped us develop a culture where the responsibility for reliability has been shared by everyone,” said LyondellBasell Principal Instrument and Electrical Reliability Engineer Shonna Victoria.

Victoria has 20 years of experience in her field and has been part of the Channelview team for 15 years, helping grow, tweak and mature the reliability program over time to bring it where it is today. She recently gave an overview of the plant’s reliability strategy and quantified outcomes at the AFPM Reliability & Maintenance Conference and Exhibition in San Antonio.

According to Victoria, three main messages were reiterated by LyondellBasell’s senior leaders when it came to reliability, and these describe the plant’s framework today.

“Number one: Management said it was not sufficient to just sustain the results we had achieved; we must continually improve,” Victoria said. “Number two: Reliability was not just the job of the reliability department. It required all the departments to work together to find ways to integrate our work processes, work smarter, and leverage the skills and resources of everyone so reliability would become a plant culture. Number three: Good reliability is necessary to achieve excellence in safety, environmental compliance, production, quality and costs improvements. These three messages have helped us sustain our total reliability program.”

Victoria also provided several examples of what has been implemented to help improve reliability at the plant.

“We are leveraging the use of technology in our plant to improve our asset performance,” she stated. “If we can leverage the ability of the equipment to give us some information back, then we will be more proactive, prevent failures and improve availability of the plant.”

Control valve signatures are smart instrumentations that allow the plant to create profiles and baseline control valves immediately once they enter the plant.

“If there are anomalies or issues while they’re in service, we’re able to compare the two profiles and make smarter decisions about what needs to take place,” Victoria said. “In some instances, this has prevented us from pulling a valve out of the line and requiring the resources to do so.”

For failure analysis, Victoria explained the plant leverages the use of cross-motional teams. These teams come together to determine the actual or contributing causes of a failure that created significant impact.

“By using cross-motional teams, we can learn from what occurred and identify very specific ways that will prevent it from reoccurring,” Victoria said. “We also have a materials analysis lab at the Channelview location, where samples of materials can be analyzed to determine why something failed and what was the cause of the defect.”

LyondellBasell’s Channelview plant is always in a mode of continuous improvement, and reliability leadership is a key component of the total reliability program.

“It takes leadership’s commitment to make reliability a major part of how we manage the business and support the plans that drive the development of the various systems that are needed,” Victoria said.

The Channelview plant has also implemented executive sponsorships because reliability upgrades are being allocated in its budget.

“Reliability engineers or specialists can generate ideas with justification and put those forward for approval,” Victoria explained. “We use a portion of that funding for a reliability upgrade. It could be something that hasn’t been a systemic or repeat failure, but we can avoid it if we get in front of it, such as single hook failures for switches. Sometimes we want to move switches where we can place transmitters that give us diagnostic information.”